


colonial tongue

by cryptidslept



Category: Half-Life, Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Biting, Clothed Sex, Explicit Consent, Graphic Depictions of Powerade, Kissing Lessons, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Not Beta Read, Other, Oviposition, Sewers, Tentacle Dick, They/Themrey, Trans Male Character, Unsafe Sex, eggs but only a little bit of eggs because i am terrified of getting hashtag cancelled, i have thoughts and ideas about how this shit works just trust me okay, it's just kinda there, there is a knife but it's not for knifeplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:54:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29972151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidslept/pseuds/cryptidslept
Summary: Benrey learns how to kiss, among other things.*"Shit," Benrey says, hands moving from where they've been basically frozen, and Gordon shushes them and pets at their jaw some more.They break. Gordon's on his back in a shitty little river of Powerade™, and his brain keeps helpfully inserting the trademark, and the bane of his current existence is straddling him starry-eyed. "I think you should kiss me again," he says.
Relationships: Benrey/Gordon Freeman
Comments: 12
Kudos: 83





	colonial tongue

**Author's Note:**

> don't read this if you're a minor. don't hate-read this. don't read this if you intend on sending it to someone who doesn't wanna see it. don't bring this anywhere near the rtvs team, and don't drag me into discourse. what happens on this account stays on this account. 
> 
> as always, my deepest apologies to people in the half-life tag who have no interest in hlvrai.
> 
> title from mad IQs- idkhbtfm.

Gordon Freeman, physics doctorate, jabs a heavy-plated finger toward Benrey, general nuisance. The kevlar covering their chest doesn't budge much. "Look," he hisses, "I'm trying to be better at acknowledging other people's points of view."

"Mhm."

"But you are making that _very difficult._ "

"Who th'fuck says 'difficult'?"

"If I say 'hard' you're just gonna make jokes."

"Ha ha," the moron actually enunciates, "hard-"

Gordon clamps the entirety of his hand over Benrey's mouth. "Shut up."

"Mrrrph."

"Just tell me, no rambling, why the hell you think it's so funny to drag all of us in the opposite direction of the exit." He draws back.

"Not s'posed to be here," Benrey chirps. 

"That's why I'm trying to _leave._ "

And so it goes.

"Benrey," Gordon says, at the bottom of an elevator shaft, fist wrapped around the idiot's tie, "why're you such a dick to me."

"I'm a tsundere, my man," Benrey flaps one hand, mocking, "don't like you but I like you, shit like that. Gonna kiss you at the last second and immediately die."

"Die of what?"

"I dunno," says Benrey, "anime girl disease?"

"And the symptoms of anime girl disease are-"

"Death."

"Everyone who dies, ever, is an anime girl?"

"That's what I said." The guard punctuates their words by scooping up Gordon and tossing him over the wreckage of a trolley car. "You're welcome!"

"I hate you." 

He gets a loud kiss blown in reply.

Their bickering is a shitty foam anchor, all things considered- the type you get your kid at a pirate-themed water park when they're exhausted and pissy, but it's an anchor nonetheless. Gordon likes to think he knows Benrey knows where the line is. And then they get separated from the team. Bubby shouts something about a wing full of broken glass, and Coomer yells back about it being a challenge, and Tommy doesn't yell very often, he's the only one with a damn brain, but he's not with them either.

"What's the plan?" Gordon starts squeezing what's probably Powerade™ out of his hair. The tunnels drip merrily.

"We-ell," Benrey upends their helmet, liquid coming out and _what? That's not how gravity works-_ "don't deal in Playcoins but for the low, low price of one kiss I could getcha out of here."

There is a silence. "...what kind of kiss?"

"Heard'ya don't like water levels very much."

"Yeah, 'cause you cut my arm off-"

"Shhhhh. Water levels suck. You don't have the necessary _finesse_ t'get through 'em, anyway."

Gordon flips them off with the last shred of dignity he has. "Just tell me what kind of kiss, man." 

"We'll get there when we get there." Benrey makes as if to start trudging through the sewer, and didn't the team already do a sewer-adjacent puzzle?

"Wait!" Gordon scowls, and kicks through the Powerade™, which almost reaches his knee. "C'mon, just kiss me, you want me out of here just as much as I do." Benrey cracks a grin. It's a charming grin, Freeman can admit, even if it reaches too far in each direction, but usually when the guard's grinning it's right before they do some reality-breaking shit. They lean the couple inches down (their height difference is negligible, but Gordon _hates it_ ) and press their mouths together with no fanfare.

Nothing changes.

"Hm," Benrey says. 

"Again," Gordon insists, because _god, he really doesn't want to do a water level,_ and this time he's the one to drag them down to his face. They hold each other's gaze for a minute, and Benrey wiggles their eyebrows. They kiss again, and Gordon realises very quickly that Benrey's a terrible kisser. "Fucking," he frowns, shoves them against the wall with HEV-augmented strength, and shoves a finger in their face. "You suck at this."

"And you swallow, ha ha."

"Take off your helmet and try and keep up." He kisses them again, coaxing their lips just the slightest bit open with his teeth, and there's a distant thud and splash when their helmet falls into the canal. "You have to tilt your head," he mutters into their mouth, and Benrey scrunches their eyes shut and does as he says without any resistance at all. Their kiss, going forward, isn't as awful as it should've been. It's sticky, and distinctively blue-flavoured, and Gordon brings his palm to their jaw when they start tilting too far. 

"What'd I do with my hands?" Benrey asks.

"Waist," he replies, resting their foreheads together, and a pair of hands circle around Gordon's waist. He can barely feel them through the suit, which is, for some reason, upsetting. They kiss again, and Gordon tries to lap at the seam of Benrey's lips, and they jerk backward for a moment, grip tightening. 

"Oh," they say, and their head makes a dull sound when it bumps back against the concrete. Gordon does the thing again, and this time they let him.

He doesn't consider himself a great kisser, it's been like a decade or whatever, but he's better than they are, so he rubs his thumb against their jaw whenever they do something real well. They keep going, back and forth and breaking for breath, and _shit,_ Gordon's actually enjoying himself. "Not bad," he admits, they moan into his mouth, and then they fall backwards into the canal, still wrapped together.

"Shit," Benrey says, hands moving from where they've been basically frozen, and Gordon shushes them and pets at their jaw some more.

They break. Gordon's on his back in a shitty little river of Powerade™, and his brain keeps helpfully inserting the trademark, and the bane of his current existence is straddling him starry-eyed. "I think you should kiss me again," he says.

"We're not even skipping the level," Benrey makes a face.

"Yeah, but-" Gordon takes a moment to watch the guard breathe, even though they don't need to, and smiles, amused. "I kinda like kissing you, man."

"No shit?"

"No shit. Do it again. Put your hands in my hair or somethin'."

They do it again. At some point, their kiss stopped tasting like blue and started tasting like mouth again, and Gordon thinks he prefers the mouth. His ex-arm keeps phantom-grasping at their hip, and that's annoying, but he puts it out of his mind when one of their knees rises and settles right between his legs. The HEV suit chirps something muffled underwater.

"Hey, so don't freak out," Benrey says, gravelly, "but I think you got a mark six."

"What's that mean?" Gordon tries to chase their mouth, arching. His curls drip. 

"I, uh. Y'know how the project got held up for a while, figuring out where to put the excretion reservoir?"

"I wasn't on the development crew."

"It was," Benrey boxes his head in between their elbows, "uh. So mark six is about preventing distractions, right? Reservoir's for any liquid. Sweat, urine…"

"Yeah?"

"So they also wanted to make sure you didn't fuck up the suit. Literally."

Gordon doesn't really get it. He tries to buck his hips against their knee. "So?"

"Dude, the suit's designed to jack you off."

Oh. He grimaces. "Can I turn it off?"

"I dunno? But I wanted _you_ to know." A large drop of Powerade™ falls onto the back of Benrey's head. They wince.

Gordon starts sitting up, straddles the guard's lap. "Well," he says, "I don't want a yeast infection. So hold still." He pats a couple times at their face, then starts undoing the latches at his hips one-handed.

"Th'hell're you doing?"

"I was gonna try to turn it off." He manages to get the plating at his thighs off, and they clink into the sugar water, and Benrey's first response is to put their coldass hands on his thighs. "Jesus _fuck,_ dude!" There is a quiet, confused noise. Gordon levels an unimpressed glare at them, realises their mouth is puffy and red, and goes back to unclamping the things keeping the HEV's codpiece and belt attached to his stupid horny body. His hair gets in his face, he growls, and then Benrey's bringing up one hand and brushing the soaked curls out of the way. They continue to drip, but Gordon can see again. He tries to steal a glance at the guard through his eyelashes- they look completely stunned at the current turn of events- and then with a hiss he's _free._

"Hey," Benrey says.

"Hi," replies Gordon, trying not to unclamp his death grip on the codpiece, which has started to announce its different vibration settings. "Thanks."

"So are you gonna-"

Gordon shakes his head. "Just- hold my hair. Please." He misses his contact lenses somethin' fierce. His glasses have gone through hell by this point, and frankly he's starting to wonder if he _wants_ to be able to see all the murders he's committing in 20/20 vision. One of Benrey's hands brushes a few droplets off his face while he squints at the codpiece, prying the back off, and he stiffens for a moment at the intimacy of it. The codpiece makes a few complaining whirs while Gordon pokes through the wiring with his pinky finger. One of the thicker wires is hot to the touch- if he had to guess, it's probably the, ah, excretion reservoir trigger. Thingy. He pretends he's not straddling the lap of someone he's been furiously making out with for the past forty-ish minutes. "D'you have some sort of. Clippy thing."

Benrey's reply is low, and much closer to his ear than expected. "I stole Bubby's knife..?"

"That works," says Gordon, and his stump jerks toward it before he curses under his breath and reaches with his other- _only_ \- hand. "Y'know, this would be a lot easier if I had two hands."

Benrey narrows their eyes. "You lost your hand privileges, bro."

"Yeah, well, I want 'em back. That hurt, and now I can't shoot, and we're in the middle of Fuck-off, New Mexico, in a drainage pipe full'a soda-"

"-Powerade™."

"I don't care, man! It sucks, and my hand's not gonna just come back, that's it, I only get _two hands._ " The pipe drips, the codpiece buzzes, and Gordon clenches his jaw, shoves the boxy thing into the crook of his elbow and cuts the stupid wire. "Here's the knife," he says. "I hate you."

"I didn't tell 'em to take your hand." Benrey doesn't take the knife.

"Yeah? Yeah? Then why didn't you _stop_ them?" Gordon abandons the mass of bullshit he's acquired in the canal, reaches out, and grabs at their tie. "You want me gone. I get it. I want me gone too."

"I just want you gone in like, the other direction," Benrey mumbles, and their mouth is still beard-burned. "You c'n hate me, s'not like I care. Or have feelings. Whatever."

"Nuh-uh," Gordon says, "I went to anger management, I know you're doing a thing."

"A thing."

"A manipulation thing! You want to make me feel bad, even though you're the one who got me beat to shit by a bunch of bootboys!"

"What'd'you want _,_ then, _Gordon_?" Benrey leans in, tie going slack. One of their hands is still on his thighs, the other holding his hair. "An apology? Hm? Want me to get on my pretty little knees and beg you t'let me be your hurt-comfort roomie? Slowburn this shit? I'm not that nice."

"I'm not that nice either," Gordon hisses, and tugs on their tie again. "I want to go home. I want to see my son. I want to think about Black Mesa approximately _never again._ You keep getting in the way, so knock it the fuck off."

The guard rolls their eyes so hard their disdain is almost audible. "I don't like fighting, y'know. Trying t'do my job and you keep screaming and falling and breaking things."

"Then let. Me. Go."

They slam into one another in a mockery of a kiss. Benrey's fingernails bite into Gordon's scalp, and his only reply is to sneer, shut his eyes, and surge forward in their lap. "None of this," Benrey spits, rolling their hips together, "is fuckin' _real._ It doesn't even _matter._ You keep pretending like all this is so fucking special, like your hand's gone forever."

"Just because it's not real doesn't mean it doesn't matter," Gordon says hoarsely, and his heartbeat drops into his crotch. "It matters to me, and it matters to the team, and I think it matters to you too, asshole." The guard makes a pretty good attempt at snarling for whatever human-adjacent thing they are, peels the undersuit as far as they can, and sinks their teeth into Gordon's throat. "If you stop I swear to god I'll gut you," he says, shaky.  
  
“Oh, are we fucking, then?” Benrey asks the column of Gordon’s neck.   
  
“Yes, dipshit. Do you want it in triplicate?” He tries to grind down to emphasise his point. The energy drink they’re sitting in sloshes, and he snorts at how ridiculous this all is: Gordon Freeman is bleeding out, a little bit, and he’s following something calling themself a security guard that’s more of a live bait to an alien homeworld, and instead of doing a water level they’re doing each other, ha ha.

“Do I look like I know what triplicate means?” Benrey asks, and their cold fuckin’ fingers start spreading open the slit in the undersuit. “Big words, big mouth. You never stop talking, man, never listen to me. Kinda hurts.” Gordon bucks his hips into their hand, like the needy little shit he is, and says some mash of syllables that somehow convince them to push his suit leggings to his knees, just enough to sit in their lap. His knuckles click against their belt buckle, against their vest, and when he reaches inside there’s a whole lot of something he’s never touched with his very human fingers before. He draws back for a minute, and hey, that’s blue.

“I’m gonna put this in my mouth,” Gordon says. “Will that kill me dead?”

“No?”

“Cool.” He puts his fingers in his mouth before the blue viscous stuff can drip off and into the sugar water. It tastes like cough syrup, and the only reason Gordon remembers what cough syrup tastes like is because he ran out of cold medicine last winter and decided, in a moment of brilliance, to chug the blueberry bullshit in the cabinet. He was out for a week, but to be fair he did get over his cold. “Huh,” Gordon says, and decides to kiss Benrey instead of having a crisis over increasingly alien anatomy.

It’s a good kiss. All of this was supposed to be some sort of payment, to get out of this stupid sewer and this stupid canal and this stupid _game,_ but frankly this might be a better deal. No murder, just arguing. Gordon can handle arguing. He’s also very wet, and if he gets a yeast infection from this whole situation he’s gonna be so pissed off, digital or otherwise, and that actually leads to a whole new line of thought: the simulation’s plugged so far into his nerves he’s probably gonna have some phantom limb shit for the rest of his life. Will his yeast infection transfer, too?   
  


“You’re doing the thing,” Benrey starts threading their dick out of their pants. “Stop thinking for fuckin’ once in your life.”  
  
“If you call your dick anything weird I’m feeding you your own shoelaces.”   
  
“Kinky.”   
  
“I hope you die painfully,” Gordon says, and then he’s spreading himself open and sinking onto their dick, which undulates beneath him and glows and _shit, shit-_

“You were saying?” Benrey prompts him. 

“Hraaugh, fuck,” is his reply. It’s cold, and he can’t feel much of anything through the stupid HEV suit gloves, and he feels just barely filled. His hand darts out, smacks blindly into Benrey’s hips a couple times, and by the time they’ve gotten the hint and brought their thumb to rub at _his_ dick, Gordon’s managed to take all of Benrey in. It’s not enough, and a tiny disappointed noise escapes him.

Benrey laughs at him, thumbs his dick tenderly, and starts moving. There’s a lot of splashing, at first, and Gordon tries to laugh at that, but then their dick starts coiling in a loose rhythm inside him and he starts losing his goddamn mind. He bows his head into the crook of their shoulder and just. Lets it happen, cold and good and _Benrey,_ and after a hard thrust in-then-out it’s like the words’ve been knocked back into him.

“I’m fucking empty, you dick,” he hisses, tries to fill himself up since the guard won’t fuckin’ do it, the asshole, and claws best he can at them until he can get their neck to his mouth. He bites, harsh, and Benrey gasps and fills him again.

“What’s wrong,” they shudder, “got abandonment issues? Need me to psychoanalyse you right-the-fuck-now, friend-”

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I’ll start insulting the size of your stupid tentacle dick unless you find a way to fill me proper.”  
  
Benrey scrapes a fingernail against the head of Gordon’s cock, and he shrieks. “Uh-huh. Sure. Want more? Hm? Ask politely, _doctor._ ”

“Something tells me you’re trying to- insult me,” Gordon says, and squeezes around Benrey. He tastes blood in his mouth, heavy, and it just makes him fall further into the headspace of getting fucked brainless. “I’m _not_ asking.”   
  
“Making demands? Desperate fuckin’, dirty boy,” Benrey chants, nips at his throat, “you’re welcome, shithead,” and something starts slithering up and into him. Something solid, and cool, and it presses into Gordon so well he considers sobbing in thanks. Instead, he curses some more, tries to will it further inside him. His legs are open as wide as they can go, trapped in kevlar and metal and they’re both still shin-deep in Powerade™, and Benrey keeps rutting into him making little mindless noises despite their big talk, and neither of them have ever, ever known what the fuck they’re doing.

“More,” Gordon finally spits out, and Benrey obliges. By now he’s settled just the slightest bit, and yeah, he’s definitely getting fucked full of eggs in a sewer canal, and he _loves it._ The teeth in his throat unlatch for a minute, and he puts his fist back around Benrey’s tie and pulls them in for a kiss.

They break again, and there’s a strand of something hanging in the tiny space between their mouths, and Benrey says something approaching ‘please,’ and then they’re kissing again, teeth clicking unpleasantly but it’s good anyway, base fucking creatures (pun intended) forgetting there’s worlds calling for both of them, and if someone tried to pull them apart before Gordon manages to cum he’d probably scream.  
  
“How’d’you feel, best friend?” Benrey asks sweetly, words broken up by their own breathing, and their hand drifts from his cock to the curve of Gordon’s stomach, where the eggs are gathering.

“We,” Gordon heaves a pitchy breath, “are _not_ friends.”   
  
“‘Course not. We’re best friends. ‘S different,” and then there’s a burst of finality in the way their hips move together. Gordon can feel the eggs nudge against one another inside him, finally fucked full, and _shit, okay, yeah,_ he _is_ coming.

His breathing is shaky. That’s the first thing his hearing decides to let him know, when it all comes back into focus, and Gordon bows his head and tries not to moan when he feels the way he’s still stretched open on Benrey’s cock. “Shit,” he says. His head feels like it’s full of cotton.

“Happy? Hm? Satisfied yet, Gordon Freeman?”

“Shiiiit,” he breathes. Tries to move, can’t, and decides that actually he’s totally fine staying right here for the next millenia.

“Taking that as a yes.”  
  
“It’s a yes,” Gordon mutters into their throat. “I think I’m gonna pass out now.”   
  
“I’ll take care of you,” is what he hears, but that can’t be right.

**Author's Note:**

> cryptidslept on twitter.
> 
> if you know who i am, this is me actively begging you to not ever ever ever talk to me about this on my main.


End file.
